Another interesting recent topic of discussion in the OSM community has been on corporate influence on the project.

The concern about corporate influence on OpenStreetMap is fairly old. For some time there had been substantial concern about a direct takeover of the OpenStreetMap Foundation by large US tech corporations. I had commented on this in the past.

But i realize that the focus of that discussion had been somewhat one sided, looking mostly at the influence of individual business interests. I would like to illustrate that with two quotes from the current discussion.

adreamy writes:

I don’t believe OSM’s identity has ever been about being anti-business or anti-capitalist. Rather, I believed it was about remaining independent of any single commercial interest, and about building a project where individuals could participate on equal footing in a genuinely open community.

Simon Poole writes:

It used to be that a majority of board members worked in companies in the geo data business, it used to be that major tagging schemes were supported and proposed by corporate entities, it used to be that people were employed to do marketing for OSM by outside companies, it used to be that major bits of “core” OSM software was written and maintained by employees of companies interested in OSM.

The last has been replaced by the OSMF employing staff and naturally this could give donors some leverage, particularly if the donations are earmarked, but it is less influence than if they were employees of third parties that could move them to different projects at a drop of the hat.

I agree with adreamy about the first part, but i would put into the question the duality he seems to present – that business interests collectively are a non-issue while the dominance of large individual business interests are.

OpenStreetMap started out as a non-capitalist endeavor in a capitalist world. Meaning it is not anti-capitalist, but it has positioned itself outside the domain that capitalism and anti-capitalism are concerned with. You can compare it to how people manage their family life – which is equally outside the world of capitalism for most. As OpenStreetMap grows the pressure to integrate into the capitalist logic of society grows, which creates conflicts where social mechanisms traditionally strong in OSM, based on intrinsic motivation of its contributors, clash with economic mechanisms and extrinsic motivation through money. In the sector of mapping this remains a limited issue, but in other sectors (organizational, technical and creative work) we see a long term trend of replacing intrinsically motivated volunteer work with extrinsically motivated paid work.

Simon Poole accurately described that the direct influence of business interests on OpenStreetMap had been stronger in the past. But it had been fairly separate from the intrinsically motivated volunteer community. This is what made this influence being widely perceived as a threat.

But what Simon also hints at is that while the direct, confrontational attempts at influencing the project from individual business interests have diminished, capitalism is increasingly entering into the core of the intrinsically motivated volunteer community. There is not much active resistance to this since OpenStreetMap – as pointed out – is not anti-capitalist. But it changes OpenStreetMap on a very fundamental level. I have written about some of the mechanisms of this in the past.

The real question – and i am not going to write about this in detail here, just point out the issue – is if OpenStreetMap is viable in the long term as capitalist project (meaning it does not only exist within a capitalist world, but embraces capitalism to define social interactions within the project) and would an OpenStreetMap along these lines be any different from other crowd sourced data collection projects?

I hinted at one important aspect of this problem back when i critically commented on the OSMF diversity statement, pointing out it actively ignores the discrimination inherent to capitalism.